You've Been Complicated

The first in a series of post concerning my favorite records.

 

Chrome - Half Machine Lip Moves (1979)

Some of my favorite songs appear elsewhere...Slip it to the Android, Animal, Something Rhythmic...but this is my favorite collection of songs by Chrome and one of my favorite "albums".*

 

Dig it...after almost a minute of gurgled moans and scrapes...the lights come on and they rip the MC5 a brand new a**hole.



Just as suddenly, it descends back into the muck...evidently to murder those riffs because the song reemerges with their entrails laid over an mechanical beat. It's deconstruction...not as an intellectual exercise but as an act of pure malice. It is completely unnerving, disorienting...and it is glorious.



Half Machine is a companion piece to Alien Soundtracks...a tighter grip on the idea. Found sound collages and industrial beats...bludgeoning these scuzzy riffs with a wrench. It's the sound of The Stooges in the process of being assimilated by the Borg.

This isn't an album that I merely enjoy...it's one that was written specifically for me. It's a record that fits perfectly into a space in my brain. There aren't many of those...but, there's enough to make a list out of.

 __________________________________________

* I really don't like albums...or I hate the idea of The Album. I'll take as many good songs as I can get but, this standard of releasing 8 to 20 songs as a coherent artistic, Artistic, statement every year is nonsense and ruination. It's a ridiculous standard that has eventually embarrassed everybody...including Mark E Smith and Prince. 

 

We all know who's to blame for this bull s***!

The last truly great Pavement release was a throw-off maxi-single...songs that were intended for the Silver Jews. There's a reason singles and EPs are so much fun. They don't bear the burden of being an Album...no ponderous bits forced into the aural narrative...tedious filler...just songs.

That's not to say it never works...I mean we have started with an album here but there will also be EPs and maybe even compilations. I refuse to adhere to the standard.

Really Melvyn?

 

 

I am a regular and enthusiastic listener of In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg on BBC Radio 4. It's been my preferred form of entertainment recently. Over the last month or so I've probably gone through a quarter of the archives (I spend a lot of time in the car).

 

It was Melvyn who broke the obsessive Chrome loop I'd worked myself into.

 

 

Ok...maybe not completely.

 

The topics are usually interesting ...and sometimes even those that aren't of obvious interest to me turn out to be really engaging...the Tale of Sinuhe is a recent example. (though I'm probably gonna take a pass on Photosynthesis...I can't for the life of me even pretend to have any interest in that). Some are just dead boring...Medici, Absolute Zero and shockingly The Amazons (how do you make Amazons boring?). The range of topics, the expertise involved and Melvyn's ability to pleasantly dictate the course of conversation...generally make for a delightful 45 minutes.

 

Has it always been this way?

 

I just tried to listen to the episode on Modernity from 1999. I could only take about ten minutes of it. It should have been called why Roger Scruton is a Dickhead...because that was the topic. Now, some of you may, I'm almost certain that some of you do, think that Roger Scruton is a dickhead. Do you want to spend the next 30 minutes contemplating that fact? You gonna hunt that up on the radio? Be sure to look under the sub-heading Modernity so you don't end up listening to a discussion on Baudelaire or Joyce.

 

If they ever discussed Modernity it was after point 10.01. I think Scruton had about 15 seconds before he was interrupted, by Indignant Academic, and called an elitist for not considering the importance of Afro-Caribbean beats to the Modern Era and focusing too much on the likes of Schopenhauer and Eliot, etc (by the way, if you're interested all of these "dead white men" have been featured on an episode of In Our Time...with Melvyn Bragg...still waiting on the episode for Dub or Hip Hop).* 

 

The real problem seemed to be that Roger had made a distinction between Popular and High Culture...Oh Aunt Fanny...how could he? And on a radio program that regularly features housewives discussing Big Brother and Eastenders.  

 

 

Maybe it got better...maybe Scruton committed suicide on the radio and everybody was satisfied. I don't know... sh*t was irritating and spoiled my usual Friday afternoon nap...as I've been writing instead.

 

Whatever!

 

I will talk about Yankees at Cracker Barrel next.

 

 *Am I the only one here who sees the Modern Era as a distinct, though hard to pin down on the timeline, period in History that is not to be confused with the Contemporary?